Hi,
On 26.07.2012 20:55, Tim Sutton wrote:
Hi
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Larry Shaffer <lar...@dakotacarto.com> wrote:
Hi Robert,
The shadows look quite nice for me. The larger issue I have is that
many of the icons are just hard to recognise when you see them lined
up side by side.
Could you please point them out. I see this problem with "open
PostGIS/SpatiaLite/MSSQL layer", but we can solve it using colours.
Also, there has been discussion on condensing some icon groups down to
one entry icon that has a popup menu (Qt's InstantPopup or
MenuButtonPopup [1]). A few toolbar icons use this now, e.g. Feature
Selection tool. Using that technique and condensing functionality into
better dialogs (see Nathan's import dialog [2]) will go a long way
towards thinning the current icon-heavy look.
When considering condensing such items care has to be taken not to
introduce extra clicks for tools that should be only one click away,
e.g. Pan and Zoom tools. Though group entry icons are very similar to
menubar menus at that point, they have the added advantages of being
language-agnostic and visible when users switch to full screen mode,
which usually hides the menubar.
My argument against these is that they defeat the purpose of icons
(making functionality available with single click). It takes two
clicks to invoke an action from a menu so in my mind the use case for
popup tool buttons should be restricted to where those tools need to
indicate a toggled state (like the map tools). A secondary
consideration is that when I give training courses the selection popup
toolbutton is something that novice users struggle with and it is not
very discoverable. Your points for it are interesting, though I
suspect that the number of people running qgis fullscreen is extremely
small.
I agree with Tim. We should avoid grouping icons, unless there is very
high usage frequency ratio (one icon used much, much often than the
other). Good example is labelling toolbar. It should be grouped and
included in some other toolbar. This optimization must be focused on
beginners, as experienced users probably use more keyboard shortcuts.
regards,
Robert
Regards
Tim
So, there may need to be some new icons made that represent tool
groups, though some discussion on condensing tools has to happen
first.
[0] http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=4ffb5dfae4b08ad9dfac3f70
[1] ToolButtonPopupMode: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.7/qtoolbutton.html
[2]
http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/Cast-your-vote-Default-icon-theme-for-QGIS-2-0-tp4987108p4987577.html
Regards,
Larry Shaffer
Dakota Cartography
Black Hills, South Dakota
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